Questionable green thumb

I like to think that I have a reasonable green thumb. When I plant things, they tend to grow more often then not.

Most of the garden has been doing really well. The herbs, especially the basil, are growing faster then we can use them. There are more then a half a dozen eggplants that are going to be ripe enough to eat this week. We have dinners made up entirely of poppers made with the jalapenos from the garden almost weekly. We have already been able to start canning the (ones that we are not able to eat right away) tomatoes.

The exception, just like it was last year, is the zucchini. Once again, despite all of our best efforts, the zucchini has fallen to the squash vine borers. Of the four zucchini plants, I pulled out the two worst effected last Friday. The remaining two are compromised as well, but I left them in place for now. There are a couple of half-ripe zucchini on them, and I would like to try to give them enough time to fully ripen before I have to destroy the plants. Very frustrating. Next year I think that any zucchini that we plant will be in separate pots on the deck. I am rather loath to cede precious garden space to something that has a good chance of dying halfway through the growing season. I would rather plant something with a better track record of productivity.

And obviously I need to do better research on how to prevent squash vine borer infestations. Obviously the insecticide we used this year didn’t cut it.

(Of course, aside from the zucchini issue, there are some aspects of the garden that have not been doing as well as they did last year, but the blame for that can pretty much be laid at the feet of the drought that our area has been in most of the summer.)

In other plant news, earlier this summer I decided to re-pot some of my indoor plants – the Christmas Cactus plants in particular hadn’t been re-potted in a long while and were looking to me like they needed it. So I went out, got the kind of soil that they need, re-potted them , and …. they decided to reward my efforts by promptly losing almost all of their leaves and most of their branches. I thought that they were going to die. That would have sucked since they are both from cuttings my Mom gave me from her Christmas Cactus, which is a huge plant and is older than I am. Fortunately, I have seen some new growth, so there is hope that they will survive and pull through yet. I suppose that I could still manage to kill them somehow, but at this point it seems less likely.